Ursula K. Le Guin died this week, and after the first sadness, I was overwhelmed with all those fantastic stories about and quotes from her emerging (like here, here, here, here and here). So this issue will be mostly a collection of that. It also makes me happy to know that so many got introduced to her this week and will start reading her books.

Take care

Johannes

What I'm reading

This article cleans up a lot of the misconceptions about the Luddites and explains how they are deliberately used to silence critical thinking.

Alexis Madrigal about the role of a piece of fiction, commissioned by the US-government: “In a world awash with statistics about global nuclear supremacy, a simple fiction about daily life in a postnuclear world served as an antidote to the bureaucratic magic that had been spun around the possibility of conflict.”

With a new album from Niels Frahm (Spotify) and a remix album from Hidden Orchestra (Spotify), this could have well been my music week of the year, already.

I also went to the 10th anniversary of the record label Erased Tapes here at Funkhaus in Berlin and listened to beautiful sets from the likes of Penguin Cafe (Spotify), Ben Lukas Boysen (Spotify), and Lubomyr Melnyk (Spotify).

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society & its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, & even imagine real grounds for hope.”

– Ursula K. Le Guin

2.

“The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin. We can’t stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.”

– Ursula K. Le Guin

3.

“Fake news” often reads, or looks on video, like weaponized design fiction.